Legal sports gambling supercharges illegal gambling and organized-crime activities
DEM at The Big Arts Center in Sanibel
Amid “March Madness,” DEM delivers his crusading stump speech about the dangers of sports gambling and organized crime at the Big Arts Center in Sanibel, Florida (March 27, 2024)
Good evening and thank you for your invitation. . . .
Since 1974, I have been a fiercely independent investigative journalist who has—all alone—specialized on investigations of the Mafia and organized crime—a really, really stupid way to have made a living all these years. During my turbulent career—which has now yielded ten true-crime books—I have been widely known as one of the most relentless freelance crime reporters in America. And I am proud of the fact that I have always been referred to as “a pro-cop liberal.”
Actually, I investigate the penetration of organized crime in legitimate institutions: American politics, the law-enforcement community, businesses, labor unions, Hollywood, professional sports, the media, and other special interest groups.
But, refusing to take a punch without fighting back, I have made nearly as many enemies as friends, burning as many bridges as I have built. Specifically, along with my probes of the Mafia, I had taken on such powerful institutions as the Teamsters Union, the National Football League, the National Rifle Association, the Los Angeles Police Department, MCA/Universal, the Reagan White House, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, along with the U.S. Department of Education, the legal and illegal gambling communities, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Fox News, Kenneth Starr and the Office of the Independent Counsel, and both the political left and right wings, as well as a variety of politicians, white-collar criminals, and murderers.
Notably though, my career-long obsession revolves around the 1975 disappearance of former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa—the subject of my first book in 1978.. I am Ahab and the Hoffa case is my white whale.
God forgive me, I love my job and my colleagues—even though I can't stand the business in which I work, aka the publishing industry in New York. Notably, three of my books are on the 27-book “Forbidden Bookshelf,” Open Road Media’s list of censored, suppressed, and flat-out killed non-fiction books.
On June 29, 1978, Herbert Mitgang, the legendary literary editor of the New York Times, published a story about a blatant attempt to suppress my book about Hoffa.
His article also served to legitimize me as a new American author.
It was my professional birth certificate at age 28.
I should add that as a grunt crime reporter, I receive no weekly paycheck, no expense account, no paid vacations, no pension, or welfare plans. Also, I will not receive a gold watch when I retire. And on top of all of that, I have been nearly killed on at least six different occasions.
I am now 74 years old, and I believe that, sooner rather than later, I will be dribbling into a cup somewhere, discovered face down on the keyboard in my office, or gunned down in the street.
The single advantage to all of this conflict and uncertainty has been that I am Joe the Boss of my own operation. Throughout my career, I have never wanted to be anything but an independent investigative journalist. And for better or worse, that is what I am.
Now, any reasonable definition of the term "organized crime" must include that it is enterprise crime, conspiracy crime, and crime by association. Consequently, for the past 50 years, I have investigated a wide variety of conspiracies, many of which I debunked.
In a pure sense, without any legal or moral considerations, organized crime figures are quintessential capitalists. They can travel from point A to point B in a straighter line than a legitimate business or institution, which must concern itself with competition, taxation, and government regulation. Thus, if the head of a legitimate institution has a relationship with an organized-crime group, he (or she) is more apt to use that relationship to cut the red tape so that his (or her) institution can travel in a straighter, more cost-effective manner.
Still, simply speaking, you cannot have organized crime without political corruption.
The real problem in waging a war against organized crime—whether as a reporter, a public official, or a private citizen—is political: the left balks at any suggestion of electronic surveillance, which, unfortunately, is the only effective means of gathering intelligence against organized crime.
You bug these guys. You wiretap them.
The conservatives decentralize power in America from the federal government down to the state and local levels. Because of decentralization, organized crime figures have, in many cases, come to first-name relationships with state and local political figures—with all their newfound power and within their own jurisdictions.
Consequently, mob guys have an uncanny ability to be civil libertarians and to support right-wing causes, simultaneously.
When I want to interview a Mafia guy, I don't walk up to him and ask, 'Hey Vito, why did you knock off Rocco?" . . . Instead, I go up to him and say that I want to talk to him about how the government is violating his civil rights.
To be sure, I have never met a mob guy who is not against wiretapping. I have never met a mob guy who isn’t in favor of strong personal privacy laws—and I have bored for hours by mob guys whining about the alleged impingements upon their rights and freedoms by the FBI and IRS.
To be clear, Mafia guys are no longer knuckle-dragging, 8th-grade dropouts. In fact, many of these guys are well educated. For instance, the Detroit Mafia now calls itself “The Detroit Partnership.” All of the members of its top leadership are college-educated, and some have even earned MBAs.
While doing research for my 1989 book about the NFL and the Mafia—one of my underworld sources took me to an illegal bookmaking joint in Chicago where the most sophisticated piece of machinery in the room was a hand-cranked adding machine. . . . That was 35 years ago.
Today, the Mafia has gone high-tech, online, and offshore—far from the reach of U.S. law-enforcement agencies.
In my book, Interference—35 years ago—I made five basic allegations:
* that no fewer than twenty-six past and present NFL team owners have had documented ties to either the gambling community or the organized crime syndicate,
* that there is evidence of no fewer than seventy fixed professional football games,
* that no fewer than fifty legitimate law enforcement investigations of corruption within the NFL have been either suppressed or flat-out killed as a result of the sweetheart relationship between NFL Security, the internal police force within the league, and various federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.
* that legalizing sports gambling will cause a proliferation of illegal bookmaking and organized crime activity, and
* that the illegal gambling economy has become an adjunct to the First Amendment because of the insistence by the sports media to print and broadcast the betting line and to hire oddsmakers and handicappers for the purpose of predicting the outcomes of games.
Once again, the movement to legalize sports gambling—which has traditionally been the Mafia’s second-biggest money-making operation after drug trafficking—will cause a proliferation of organized-crime and illegal-gambling activities.
Generally speaking, legalized gambling is a major political issue. For many years, state lotteries have raised billions of dollars by enticing the citizens who play them, most of whom are poor and powerless, to gamble. Meantime, legalized casino, riverboat, and Indian reservation gambling—under the guise of charitable, non-profit operations—have grown considerably while creating a whole new generation of gamblers.
To be sure, the politicians have seen what suckers we've all become when it comes to state-approved gambling, which is nothing more than another form of regressive taxation. In short, legalized gambling is a con game.
It is my belief that state governments do not get into the bookmaking and casino businesses, directly or indirectly, for eleemosynary purposes. They are doing so to make money by convincing their citizens that they can enrich themselves by throwing away their money. Meantime, the states which opt for sports gambling wind up teaching the public how to gamble and, perhaps, even how to use such devices as the point spread.
Sooner or later, the betting public is going to realize that the state or any number of these sports-gambling operations is taking a large skim of the handle—of the total pool of bets—and, eventually, the public is going to come to terms with the fact that they can get a bigger bang for their buck, betting with Charlie the Bookie, the friendly local mobbed-up bookmaker at the corner bar, who is going to make them put up $11 to win $10 and is only taking a ten percent commission or vigorish, aka “The Vig,” on the losing bets he books.
And Charlie is also going to extend credit to his customers and be willing to loan them money—which are services the state will not do. In other words, illegal gambling, once again, thrives amid a system of legalized gambling—where a piece of your losing bet is going to wind up in the pocket of some Mafia guy.
Certainly, gambling has made life more interesting for some Americans, but, simultaneously, gambling has also brought Mafia figures, bookmakers, lay-off operators, loan sharks, and juice collectors into our culture. And our nation has simply been unable to accept the link between organized crime and the legal and illegal gambling communities, as well as the consequences of this cabal—and how syndicate gambling activities have helped to finance other illicit operations, such as drug trafficking and political corruption.
It wasn’t until 2018 that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a stunning but idiotic landmark decision, supercharged the legalization of sports gambling nationwide.
The NFL and its team owners wasted no time taking full advantage by placing legal sports bookmaking facilities inside their stadiums.
For many years, I have been beating a tambourine—including during my May 1993 testimony before the New Jersey State Assembly—insisting that legalized sports gambling will destroy college and professional sports.
I cannot resist revisiting the world-class prediction that I made during my appearance on ABC’s Nightline on September 11, 1989, about the NFL team owners’ veiled determination to profit from and actively promote sports gambling if and when it ever became legal.
The two other guests were Michael “Roxy” Roxborough, then the top oddsmaker in Las Vegas, and Warren Welsh, then the chief of NFL Security, the internal investigative unit of professional football.
I knew and respected these two guys, both of whom I interviewed for my 1989 book, Interference, about the NFL and the Mafia—although, as the film shows, they did not share my enthusiasm for what I predicted.
(To the audio/video tech man) Please roll the Nightline excerpt. . . .
Jeff Greenfield: Dan Moldea, your principal concern is organized crime’s influence. Wouldn’t legalized gambling diminish the influence of organized crime?
Dan Moldea: No, I don’t think so. I think it’s going to enhance it. . . . I think what’s happening in the NFL is that the NFL owners want to control the gambling themselves. I think they want to have it right in the stadium, just as you would at a horseracing track, where you could go to a pari-mutuel window and make a bet on . . . any game that’s going on. . . .
Michael “Roxy” Roxborough: That’s too bizarre, Dan. Too bizarre.
Warren Welsh: It’ll never happen.
Moldea: I think that’s coming, because I think that’s why Jim Finks is being caught up for NFL commissioner—because they want a commissioner who’s going to be a little more sensitive to the problem of gambling in the NFL.
Roxborough: Totally outrageous. Totally outrageous.
Moldea: We’ll see.
Roxborough: Okay.
Moldea: Remember where you heard it first.
Greenfield: Mr. Welsh, do you have any sense that Mr. Moldea is predicting the future?
Welsh: Absolutely not. I think he’s 100 percent incorrect.
Moldea: Talk to Gene Klein, former owner of the San Diego Chargers. He agrees with that. The NFL owners want to control the gambling. They want to control the vigorish.
Welsh: He’s a former owner.
Moldea: He’s a former owner who wishes he could have controlled the gambling and the vigorish.
Roxborough: (laughing)
Moldea: You have to understand that these new owners, the eleven owners who are stopping Pete Rozelle from finally retiring—after a fine job that he did—are putting themselves in a position where they’re holding a lot of paper, holding a lot of debt. They’re spending $100 million for their teams. Television revenues aren’t going to carry the day for these NFL owners for long. They need the gambling. They need the vigorish.
Welsh: Absolutely incorrect. [Emphasis added]
My controversial prediction has now been completely vindicated.
To be clear, the problem here is not simply the issues of gambling, drugs, and corruption: Once again, the real problem is organized crime, which, as I say again, has gone high-tech, online, and offshore.
In conclusion, crime reporters like me are just old gumshoe detectives. Whatever computers and electronic databases, the Internet, social media, and the information highway can do to make our jobs easier are more than welcome. But—today, just as yesterday—a good crime reporter must get out in the street and be willing to put himself on the line for an important story.
NOTE: For over an hour after my prepared remarks—along with their questions about sports gambling and the Mafia—members of the audience asked me about, among other subjects, the murders of Jimmy Hoffa and Senator Robert Kennedy, as well as about the suicide of Vincent Foster and the presidential candidacy of RFK Jr.
Absolutely outstanding information that you will not hear about anywhere else. I encourage everyone who thirsts for the truth in investigative reporting to stop, look and listen to Dan Moldea. “They don’t make-‘‘em like this anymore!” He is a triple threat to the ongoing criminal behavior of politicians, those who say they are legitimate businessmen and other latent creeps that harm or society. “La grande Bravo” to Dan.
If I'm going too out of my way too place a bet on a sport I'd trust the local Charlie the bookmaker than a huge corporate gaming outfit. Charlie is tax free payment for the winner. I'm in absolute agreement with you sir. It's going to ruin the whole thing we love about sports. Greed owners.